To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries “were not aware” from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbé Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--“conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church.”[169] Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the “wicked heathen” convey the _lingham_ of Siva. To have used _this_ car to carry in its turn the Romish representative of the female principle in nature, is to show discrimination and a thorough knowledge of the oldest mythological conceptions. They have blended the two deities, and thus represented, in a Christian procession, the “heathen” Brahma, or Nara (the father), Nari (the mother), and Viradj (the son). Says Manu: “The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son.”[170] There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against _an accident_ than a Pagan _Mysta_ or the Μύστης.